Dublin's starting to look like New York. But down at the other end of the island, on the Beara Peninsula, you still draw your own pints at The Celtic Tiger and throw the money in a box.

The cash register throws everybody for a loop. I watch as they come into Teddy O'Sullivan's pub and stop and gawk at the machine as if a UFO had landed in their midst. "Jaysus, would you look at that gadget," one old farmer says. He shakes his head, sits and orders a pint. He worries his pockets for a worn bill and pays Helen Moriarty, who came down from "up the country" when she was a teenager to apprentice under her Uncle Teddy and Aunt Joan. Teddy has passed on, and at eighty-four, Joan serves as a kind of publican emeritus, so Helen runs the show.

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She bought the machine from a traveling salesman mostly because he was a "nice young fella," and now it sits square and white and unplugged on the bar while she figures out what to do with it. She takes the farmer's crumpled ten-punt note and drops it in a wooden drawer behind the bar. That drawer has been the till as long as anyone can recall, which, for some regulars, is a very long time.

Now, this is in no way my grandfather's Ireland. The Celtic Tiger is raging, and Ireland is poor no more. The place is jumping and humming to the beat of high-tech cash and has the fastest-growing economy in the world. Unemployment is pretty much a lifestyle choice. Mobile phones are as common as potatoes, and sex and heroin are as easy to get in Dublin as in Manhattan. Going from the Third World to the First in less than a generation does come with glitches; all that change so fast is like your mailman uncle winning the lottery. So as a new business class ponders its portfolios over lattes, consequent problems are glaring: immigration, racism, a housing market that is starting to rival New York's for sheer lunacy, traffic like Bangkok. Progress, as always, is a mixed bag.

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But way down here, back and beyond on the Beara Peninsula, a mountainous finger that juts out into the Atlantic and points toward Montauk, you are as far as you can be on this island from the Irish capital. Here, a cash register can still cause a commotion.

Helen tends bar, runs the upstairs B&B, and serves as the unofficial lord mayor. She manages a warm greeting for everyone, whether it's your first time through the door or your ten thousandth. If you're a "blow-in," you hope Helen takes you under her wing. I find out quickly that she's a clearinghouse for anything you need. Want to rent a cottage? A few phone calls and "you're sorted out." Like lamb chops? "Now, you want to see Felix McCarthy in the church parking lot after mass. He sells them right out of his car." Best fishing spots? A nod toward an old-timer huddled over a whiskey. "There's your man." You get the feeling that if you stick around long enough, Helen'll know you're dead before you do.

Her clientele consists of two main groups: the locals and the blow-ins. The locals are mostly farmers. It seems the old ones work the rocky land and the young ones harvest the mussel and salmon farms that dot the bay. The blow-ins are an eclectic mix: There's the Dutch painter who recently got soused and sat naked under one of his landscapes in the back room, fishermen from other parts of Ireland who come down to work the whitefish and tuna boats that leave from Castletownbere, retired Yanks, Brits fleeing the tax man. About half the locals are named O'Sullivan--descendants of the Beara O'Sullivans who, after cycles of slaughter and treachery, lost the place to the English back in the seventeenth century--and it is not uncommon for them to use three first names to distinguish, say, one Michael O'Sullivan from the next. Mike Jim Joe as opposed to Mike John Pat.

Helen introduces me to everyone who walks in the door. One night I get to drinking with Paddy Green, who is an O'Sullivan, and Paddy George, who is not. The two Paddys were born in the thirties and are living bridges to the nineteenth century. They talk about walking to school barefoot and remember German planes sputtering into the sea during the "emergency," as the neutral Irish called World War II. Paddy Green is an expert on the local geography. At seventy, his face has a crease for every season he has ever seen, but his body has the spunk of a teenager. He's famous for hiking dozens of miles at a time. He is Helen's go-to guy on vanished villages. Before the potato famine, there were an estimated thirty-five thousand inhabitants in the area. These days there might be five thousand. Paddy Green can point you to a lot of places that are no more.

They speak English, but the brogues are so thick down here, it's often hard to tell. The accent is like the surrounding land--lots of lows and highs and usually going up on the last syllable. Paddy George's first word to me is A-mur-a-KAY?

There are Gaeltachts, places where Irish is the first language, sprinkled about the area. But here in Kilmakillogue, where it is the second, the residue of the eclipsed Irish is still so strong that even people like the two Paddys, who grew up speaking English, speak in a kind of singsong patois that mimics Irish. People from Dublin come here, listen, and scratch their heads. I am convinced the locals told their conquerors, We'll speak your language, but you'll never understand us when we do.

In their stories, time is relative. The common refrain, "years ago," might mean two years or two hundred, or it might be a reference to an era before we figured out how to capture fire. I call it the land of the elastic fact. It's best to clarify: No one lies, but they all have their version of the facts, and they're sticking to them. Parts of the Beara were not electrified until the late 1960s, so there was not even radio, never mind the dulling influence of television, just the stories. Helen heads to bed, and we are left alone in the quiet pub, trusted to pull our own pints and drop the money in the drawer. An Atlantic squall brushes the windows with rain. Paddy George tells me about a double murderer named Rabbick who hid from capture in a cave close by the place I rented. He tells the story with such freshness that you'd swear he'd seen the homicidal bastard on his way to the pub. The man was hung for his deed in 1831.

The salmon and mussel farmers use Teddy's as a kind of clubhouse. Helen lets them run tabs and listens to them relate the day's misadventures on the sea. When they're lovelorn, she lends an ear; when they're hungry, she heaps the food on their plates. One cold night she picked the glass out of Finbar's head after he rolled his van on the insane fun-park ride they call the coast road.

And she'll always fix you up with work. One morning I meet Kieran Lyons on the pier, and the only sound is the stark applause of great sea birds hovering in the rising sun. As we load supplies onto his boat, the fish-reek of the place has me on the verge of puking. As soon as he points the skiff into the wind, the air is clean and cool, and the sun dazzles, blinding as it bounces off the deep blue sea.

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We spend the day dressed in yellow rain slicks, working the lines on his mussel farm, pulling twenty-foot vertical strands of the tiger-striped mollusks out of the briny water. It's months until harvest, but it is important to check the lines regularly, to keep them spaced so the mussels have room to grow from the present thumb size to the plump and meaty creatures the French go mad for. We drag the lines up, slice them off with filleting knives, and move them down the row. It's hump work, pure and simple.

Kieran shows me how to reattach them with clove-hitch knots. The day passes easily on the sea. Ten years ago, Kieran, who comes from a family of traditional Irish musicians, traveled down from County Clare to fish, and stayed. Like many of the mussel farmers, he needs other ways to make money. He's waiting for a call from the captain of a tuna boat. When it comes, he'll go hundreds of miles out on the Atlantic for days at a time. It doesn't seem to bother him that twenty-seven fishermen have died off the west coast of Ireland in the past year.

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In the summer, the sun doesn't set until eleven o'clock, so when we chug back to Teddy's pier at four, we still have a full day of sunshine ahead. After a few pints, Kieran heads home to his wife and two young sons, and Helen has Elaine, her cook and second in command, whip me up some fat pork chops. In these parts, the meat comes with three types of potatoes--boiled, baked, and fried. It's as if they are trying to reassure themselves that the famine is indeed over.

Tuesday night is card night, and the old-timers descend from the hills in their tweed jackets and mud-caked shoes, looking for a score. Time and hard work in the fields have burnished their faces into living monuments. They play a type of knock rummy, and they play it fast and furious and loud. The ball-breaking is intense. Gnarled hands slam the table when things don't go their way. They eye me up like easy pickings, but I want no part of this cutthroat stuff.

Besides the cards, it's a slow evening, so when Finbar says, "Feck it, let's go to Parknasilla for a pint," I say why not. Elaine decides on the spot to take a leave of absence, and off we go in Finbar's battered skiff. Of course, there are no life jackets, and, of course, only Elaine is sober. It's twilight and Macgillicuddy's Reeks, Ireland's highest mountains, jut like shark fins across the darkening water. Finbar assures me he knows the bay like the back of his hand, and he weaves the few miles across to the grand old hotel.

We mount the sea-slimy stairs like pirates, cross the croquet lawn, and burst into the nineteenth-century playpen of the aristocracy, startling the dull air. The bartender's eyebrow arches audibly, but he's a local lad, so he pulls away. Old men in bow ties look up at us and shrug. A tuxedoed pianist tickles out a Tin Pan Alley ditty. The first pint tastes so good that we guzzle another, and when we get back to the boat, night has come down, a deep, inky blackness.

Finbar pushes me fore to watch for "whales and tings" with a flashlight. A few days earlier, another mussel farmer had spotted a killer whale and her pups lolling in the bay. In the distance, the red dock light at Teddy's shimmers. The night air has chilled, and the sea spray shoots up into my face. Now, I have never swum farther than one pool length in my life. I want to point out that I did not move to Ireland to end up a lower part of the food chain, but Fin has that Ahab gleam in his eye, so I just keep the feeble torch pointed straight ahead. The boat stalls, we drift, Finbar curses, mucks about, and finally we make it back.

Helen is always pointing me toward new sights on the peninsula. I spend days on my bicycle exploring--down the rocky coast, up into the Slieve Miskish Mountains, through villages like Ardgroom, Eyeries, and Allihies, where all the buildings are brightly hued splashes of color against the deep green of the surrounding hills. At Garnish beach, a silver crescent on the end of the Beara, a lobsterman offers me a couple pound-and-a-halfers dripping salt water. They'll go well with Felix's lamb chops.

The Gulf Stream runs right into Ireland, and the vegetation here is bizarre. Along the bay you'll come upon deciduous forest, palm trees (yes, palm trees), the odd stand of bamboo, and fat-leafed jungle plants. The old English plantation owners imported flora from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and just about anything will grow here.

As I climb the hills, the coastal lushness gives way to a stark lunar landscape, foreboding. Ruins dot the place. The peninsula has one of the highest concentrations of megalithic ruins in Europe. Ogham obelisks jut toward the cloudy skies, and stone circles like small Stonehenges abut modern bungalows. You wonder what the hell our Bronze Age ancestors were trying to say.

One day I follow a road until it turns to dirt, then a grass path, and then nothing, just a field along a crisp and fast river, with dark green hills rising above. I come upon it suddenly. There are outlines of fields, a street, heaps of rocks that were homes that sheltered peasantry and their animals. There were festivals and traditions and a language--all gone. It's the ruins of a village wiped off the face of the earth by the famine 150 years ago. I stand alone in the lost valley and try to imagine mass starvation in a place so lush, so green, so alive, but they died by the hundreds in places like this, their lips stained from eating grass in a last futile effort at life. I head down the valley, the ground spongy under my feet. It must have taken a long time to die of starvation with this much water.

Back in Teddy's, the talk is about the widening of the roads. The Beara has long avoided the fate of its two neighboring peninsulas to the north, the Ring of Kerry and the Dingle, because the roads can't accommodate the tour buses that descend on those places like panzer divisions from May until October. The fatter thoroughfares will bring months of Yanks and Brits and Germans in bad slacks, their pink faces stuck to instamatics. The Beara, one of the few unspoiled places in Europe, is soon to be besieged.

Helen is philosophical about the roads. "Not much we can do about that, can we?" she says. She still needs to figure out what to do about her new cash register. It's been collecting dust for weeks. For now, she says, "It makes a pretty good doorstop."